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NATIONAL Prime Minister Narendra Modi – honoured with Russia's highest

state decoration, Order of St Andrew the Apostle on April 12, for

promoting partnership and friendly relations between the two

countries

The information was shared by the Russian Embassy in India. This is the second international award the PM received this month after Zayed

Medal, the United Arab Emirates' highest civilian award With the Russian award, PM Narendra Modi has now been conferred with

around seven top global awards. The Order of 'St Andrew the Apostle' is the highest order and the oldest state

order of Russia, first established in 1698. It was abolished under the Soviet Union but re-established in 1998. In 2017, Chinese president Xi Jinping was awarded the Order of St Andrew the

Apostle The other heads of state to receive the prestigious award include Nursultan

Nazarbayev, former President of Kazakhstan and Heydar Aliyev, late President of Azerbaijan

EVERYDAY CURRENT AFFAIRS – APRIL 12, 2019

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INTERNATIONAL US President Donald Trump's ban on transgender Americans in the

military - came into force on April 12, 2019

Trump's administration has insisted that there is a great risk to military effectiveness and lethality to allow transgender people to serve

The move reverses a policy enacted under his predecessor Barack Obama The policy has undergone various changes since Trump first announced it on

Twitter in July 2017 The US Supreme Court ultimately ruled in January that the policy could take

effect pending the outcome of ongoing litigation

Sudan's long-time president Omar al-Bashir - has been removed

from office and arrested following months of civilian protests

In a television address, Defense Minister Ahmed Awad Ibn Awf said the 75-year-

old leader has been arrested and put in a safe place On 30 June 1989, Colonel Omar al-Bashir led a bloodless military coup,

suspended political parties and introduced an Islamic legal code on the national level.

On 16 October 1993, al-Bashir appointed himself President and disbanded the Revolutionary Command Council.

Sudan became a one-party state under the National Congress Party (NCP) in 1996

The United States subsequently listed Sudan as a state sponsor of terrorism

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PERSONALITIES The Australia-born WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange - arrested by

British police at Ecuador‟s embassy in London, his home since

June 2012, after it withdrew his asylum status

At the time, he was famous as the face of WikiLeaks, as the whistleblowing

website exposed government secrets worldwide, especially the release of 5,00,000 US documents on the Iraq and Afghan wars

He is likely to be extradited to US and face indictment for conspiracy to commit computer intrusion along with former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning in 2010, revealing classified war crimes information

Assange created WikiLeaks in 2006 with a group of likeminded activists and information technology experts, to provide a secure way for whistleblowers to leak information

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SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY & ENVIRONMENT The Israeli spacecraft - called Beresheet, the first privately funded

mission to the Moon - has crashed on the lunar surface after the

apparent failure of its main engine

During the soft touch-down descent on the Moon’s surface, it suffered technical

problems and crashed The aim of the mission was to take pictures and conduct experiments to study

Moon’s magnetism on the lunar surface The project has cost about $100m (£76m) and has paved the way for future low-

cost lunar exploration Beresheet, which is Hebrew for "in the beginning", was a joint project between

SpaceIL, a privately funded Israeli non-profit organisation, and Israel Aerospace Industries

SpaceIL’s origins lie in the Google Lunar XPrize, an international challenge offering $20m for the first privately developed spacecraft to land on the Moon.

The Beresheet mission was launched on 22 February from Cape Canaveral in Florida off on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket

The average distance to the Moon is 380,000km (240,000 miles) Only government space agencies from the former Soviet Union, the US and

China have achieved soft lunar landings The former Soviet Union achieved the first soft landing with its spacecraft Luna 9

in 1966. Nasa followed this by getting the first humans to the Moon in 1969 Then, China's Change-4 spacecraft touched down on the far-side of the Moon

earlier this year.

Scientists - have discovered a new human species „Homo

luzonensis‟ in Philippines

It is classified a separate species on the ground of 13 bones and teeth from two

adults and one child found in a cave on the island of Luzon in the Philippines These remains were aged between 67,000 years to 50,000 years old Unlike Homo sapiens, whose premolar teeth generally have a single root, Homo

luzonensis' premolars had two or three roots They are similar to more primitive species such as Homo erectus, which lived in

Africa and Asia between about 1.89 million and 143,000 years ago.

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APPOINTMENTS Benjamin Netanyahu – to become the Prime Minister of Israel for a

straight fifth term

Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party - has finished ahead in the general election,

with 36 seats for the 120-seat parliament, Knesset A coalition would likely make Netanyahu as the longest-serving prime minister in

Israel's history. Kahol Lavan, the political alliance led by former Israeli army chief of staff Benny

Gantz conceded defeat with 35 seats

Professor Najma Akhtar – appointed as the vice-chancellor of

Jamia Millia Islamia – for a period of five years

Thus, she becomes the first woman VC of the central university in Delhi, 99 years after its inception

Professor Najma Akhtar is an academician from the National Institute of Educational Planning and Administration

She has been a Commonwealth Fellow for University Administration Course at University of Warwick and Nottingham.

She is also trained at the International Institute of Educational Planning (IIEP),

UNESCO, Paris. The Vice Chancellor's post at Jamia had been lying vacant after Talat Ahmad

resigned last year to join as head of Kashmir University

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JMI was founded on October 29, 1920, by the Ali brothers, Moulana Mohammad Ali Jouhar and Moulana Shoukat Ali during the British rule in Aligarh

Dr.Zakir Hussain was the first Vice-Chancellor of JMI It became a central university by an act of the Indian Parliament in 1988 Manipur Governor Najma Heptulla is the chancellor of the varsity

Justice Vikram Nath, the senior most judge of Allahabad High

Court - was appointed as the first Chief Justice of the newly-

constituted Andhra Pradesh High Court

His name was recommended by the collegium of Supreme Court, comprising of

Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi besides Judges S A Bobde and N V Ramana

The new Andhra Pradesh High court was established on January 1, 2019 following the division of a combined high court of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh.

AWARDS Two schemes of West Bengal Government - „Utkarsh Bangla‟ (skill

training of youth) and „Sabooj Sathi‟ (cycles for students) won the

World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) awards of UN

Utkarsh Bangla got the topmost award in the ‘Capacity Building category’ and

the Sabooj Sathi was ranked in the first five as a champion project under ‘ICT application: E-Government category’

Utkarsh Bangla Scheme is aimed at providing vocational training to school dropouts

Sabooj Sathi is a scheme for distribution of bicycles to the students of class IX to XII studying in Govt. run and Govt. aided schools and Madrasas

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Alice G. Vaidyan, Chairman and Managing Director of the General

Insurance Corporation (GIC) of India - has been awarded the

Freedom of the City of London in recognition of her work to

promote insurance ties between India and the UK

Alice G. Vaidyan was the first lady officer to assume the post of Chairman-cum-

Managing Director of General Insurance Corporation of India She was also the first lady chairman-cum-managing director in the public-sector

insurance industry (non-life) under the Ministry of Finance in India She has been trained at Harvard Business School, Boston, USA and a Fellow of

the Insurance Institute of India Freedom of the City is an honour bestowed by a City of London Corporation

upon a valued member of the community

SPORTS Silver medallist at the Rio Paralympics, Deepa Malik - was named

recipient of the New Zealand Prime Minister‟s Sir Edmund Hillary

Fellowship for 2019 in recognition of her two big “inspiring

achievements” - courage and a can-do attitude

The 48-year-old Deepa will work to promote sporting, cultural and people-to-

people relationship between India and New Zealand Deepa Malik had won the silver medal in shot put event in Rio in 2016 Sir Edmund Percival Hillary was a New Zealand mountaineer, explorer and

Philanthropist He served as New Zealand’s High Commissioner to India and Bangladesh and

concurrently as Ambassador to Nepal from 1985 to 1988 Hillary and Nepalese Sherpa mountaineer Tenzing Norgay became the first

climbers confirmed to have reached the summit of Mount Everest on 29 May 1953

They were part of the ninth British expedition to Everest, led by John Hunt

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INTERNATIONAL DAY The International Day of Human Space Flight – April 12

The day marks the anniversary of the first ever human space flight undertaken

by Yuri Gagarin, a Soviet Union citizen then, in 1961 In 2011, the United Nations declared April 12 the ‘International Day of Human

Space Flight’ The day is also observed as ‘Cosmonautics Day’ in Russia and some other

countries Thirty-five years ago, on April 3, 1984, the first Indian astronaut, Wing

Commander Rakesh Sharma, entered space aboard the Soviet rocket Soyuz T-11

In October 1957, the Soviet Union sent the ever man-made object, Sputnik, into outer space

Only three nations have been able to put a man in outer space so far: the USA, Russia, and China

Now, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is all set to execute its first ever human space flight programme, Gaganyaan by 2022.

Many private players are also attempting human space endeavours including Virgin Galactic led by Richard Branson, Blue Origins led by Jeff Bezos, and SpaceX led by Elon Musk.

Firsts In The Space

• April 12, 1961: Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit the Earth. • June 16, 1963: Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman to orbit the Earth. • March 18, 1965: Alexei Leonov became the first person to conduct a spacewalk • March 31, 1966: Luna 10 was launched and was the first spacecraft to be placed in Moon orbit. • July 20, 1969: Neil Armstrong became the first human to set foot on the

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surface of the Moon. • March 2, 1972: Pioneer 10 probe was launched. It was the first spacecraft to explore the Asteroid Belt, fly by Jupiter and leave the Solar System.

July 17, 1975: Docking of Apollo and Soyuz spacecraft in space was the first international human mission to space.

• July 20, 1976: The unmanned space probe ‘Viking 1’ transmitted the first pictures from the surface of Mars. • 1984: Rakesh Sharma, the former Indian Air Force pilot, became the first person of Indian origin to travel in space. He flew in the space aboard Soyuz t-11, which was launched on April 2, 1984. He flew as part of the Intercosmos programme. • 1997: Kalpana Chawla, an Indian American astronaut, became the first woman of Indian origin to be in space

US space flight company SpaceX - carried out its first commercial

launch with its Falcon Heavy rocket by placing a Saudi satellite in

orbit on April 11, 2019 in Cape Canaveral, Florida

The 13,000-pound Saudi Arabian telecommunication satellite is operated by

Arabsat It is expected to provide television, internet and mobile phone service to the

Middle East, Africa and Europe. Falcon Heavy rocket is capable of generating more than 5 million pounds (2.3

million kg) of thrust at liftoff Falcon Heavy was initially designed with an aim to restore the possibility of

sending humans to the Moon or Mars, but now it is being considered mainly as a potential equipment carrier for deep space destinations

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HOW WE GOT THE FIRST EVER IMAGE OF A BLACK HOLE ON APRIL 10 – A REPORT

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LOK SABHA ELECTIONS 2019 KICKS OFF – A REPORT

The first phase of general elections - was held on April 11 - in 91 constituencies spread across 20 states and Union territories in India.